By Year

Inkscape Evaluation

Jan 21 2005

I thought that if I have to do the icons in SVG ever again, I may as well
revisit the river. Since I just upgraded to Ubuntu Hoary (Gnome 2.10 is slick!), I
gave Inkscape a try again.

Since I’m an old Illustrator junkie, I knew it’s going to be tough getting
used to especially since I’ve tried and failed before. I expected being
disappointed, I was surprised in many areas though. Looks like a lot of good
stuff happened while I wasn’t watching :) I’m actually confident that it’s
usable to create less complex artwork.

So let’s start with the good things.

Nice shortcut overview. It could have been setup on a landscape A4 to get
printed easily though.

A few introductory tutorials. Just what I needed. It’s actually better
for me than a full featured documentation which is usually too boring to chew
through ;). What’s even more fun is these tutorials are in fact SVG images,
so it features examples you can try right on canvas while reading.
Ingenious.

Keyboard navigation not only for object and canvas movement, but rotation
and scaling as well (now finally the Alt
modifier starts making sense). Moving in pixel units with Alt of the current zoom level is a lot better than
the absolute units in Adobe Illustrator. This absolutely rocks.

Layers with visibility toggle and layer locking! Oh man, I can’t
stress enough how this is useful. Also individual objects can be locked, but
unlocking them is hard, I could only do this with the XML editor.

F12 toggles the visible floating docks.
Very handy in fullscreen (although the layout dock seems to be
visible all the time).

While function keys are still mapped to tools, there’s also shortcuts
that are easily memorizable – T for Text,
S for Object select etc. # for grid toggle got me :).

Color Dropper. I prefer to call it picker instead since it’s not
applying color on the clicked objects, it’s picking it up and
applies on the selected objects. Unfortunately the tool isn’t as useful as
it could be. It only takes the color property while it could be used to pick
more properties such as stroke, fill (gradient, pattern, bitmap), effects,
etc. (configurable as tool options just like in GIMP). Inkscape does provide
this functionality with Edit>Paste Style, but doesn’t allow
individual style properties to be selected (only fill, only stroke…).

Helpful status bar. It tells you what a modifier key will do. It doesn’t
list all functionality, but mostly the important one. Absolutely cool for
when you’re learning the tool. I found Alt+Click like that. It’s used to “select under” with
the selection tool active and it’s very handy when I’m left without a nice
layer stack overview.

Boolean Operations. Creating complex shapes out of primitives is a lot
easier with these tools.

Cloning. Instead of duplicating, you can create an instance of an object.
Gotta get used to the fact that even transformations are inherited.

Didn’t crash on me ;) While some of us take it for granted, some projects don’t consider stability a
priority…

So as you can see, in many areas I’ve been very pleasantly surprised. You
can see Inkscape developers did listen to their artists, err users. There’s
some inconsistencies with the GIMP that I personally find confusing:

Path tool. I mean come on guys, the GIMP path tool rocks. The modifiers
rock, you can work with both nodes and segments and it’s just unnice
to have something out of this planet when users like me, that are used to
GIMP could be making paths in Inkscape in a nano. /me makes a sad, sad
face.

I’m used to tracing objects by creating a polygon first and then
converting the particular nodes to curvy. I just found the trick is not to
try to convert a node, but a segment to a curve. Maybe if I try hard enough,
I can live with this. Also I’d love the handles to be controllable with a
keyboard, not only the nodes alone.

Redo is Ctrl+Shift+Z while GIMP’s is Ctrl+Y.

Ctrl locks aspect while Shift centers the pivot point. GIMP’s exactly the
other way around.

I miss the thumbnail navigator that GIMP has in the lower right
corner. Also zoom-on-resize locking that’s in GIMP 2.2 (upper right corner)
would be useful here too. Update: I’ve been pointed out that I’m just
blind, it’s right there! ;)

The gradient editor is even worse than GIMP’s. When I’m bitching about
it, I guess I should provide a spec. But more annoying than defining the
gradient is not being able to specify direction and length on canvas.

Some minor nitpicks and suggestions.

Layer support is fairly primitive and unfinished. Apart from the spartan
XML editor, I found no way to get a graphical representation of the layer
stack. Moving objects across layers also seems only possible in XML editor
which is very hard, since the stack is reversed and the layers aren’t easily
identifiable (UI shows comments, while XML edito shows ids). Also I’m not
sure about the behaviour of the root node.

While it may sound like a good idea to use vector icons in a vector
editor, it doesn’t work in my opinion. The small resolution icons need detail
and crispness the vectors cannot give. Having a nice gnomish icon set would
surely help.

I miss tootips for the toobar icons.

Tool options are implemented as global preferences. While there is a
shortcut to get to these by double-clicking on the toolbar, you’re presented
with a horror of two rows of tabs. Yikes!

Some sort of library is required. Just like GIMP stores brushes and
gradients, Inkscape should have some global repository of gradients and
patterns.

There’s XY properties floating window depending on what type
of object is selected. These should go into the object properties float. If
the number of widgets would grow, solve either by using tabs or disclosure
triangles.

Something completely subjective – I prefer the rubberband selection
to work objects even partially selected, not only the ones completely
enclosed in the selection rectangle.

Ctrl+A actually select all object
within a layer not on the document as the tutorial suggests. Not
saying it makes less sense, just that the docs are out of sync.

One cannot group objects from different layers. Especially painful when
moving objects around layers manually is tough.

I coulnd’t figure out how to scale a pattern. In fact it should be
possible to not scale pattern along with object. Similarly, it should be
possible to scale an object but not scale the stroke width along.

Cloning is cool, but it would be super cool to be able to create such
object clones (links) within an external file. You could create mime type
icons by linking the document template from an external file and have a quick
way to alter the whole set.

And I few features I’m still missing an alternative for:

Object blending. Select two objects and pick how many inbetween states
you want or optionally a path along which to do the morph. Essential time
saviour when duplicating objects. Inkscape does have a mean that’s a bit less
straight forward (subjective again). You can either use stamping and then
distribute objects using the align dock or do the same with clones or
duplicates (just need to pick one from the duplicated stack and reposition to
the other extreme).

Converting stroke into objects. Sometimes you want to have more control
about the dotted outline.

I may have just missed it, but there’s no outline draw mode. Sometimes
it’s easier to find an object like that. Also perhaps when tweaking shapes
with the node tool, the fill could go away to speed things up. The more
complex the artwork is, the slower the thing gets. And sometimes way way
slower than bearable.

Pixel preview. If we had the same renderer in GNOME & Inkscape, it would
help tweaking the shapes pixel-precise, so it’s sharp (aligns to the render
grid) at the 1:1 size.

Node edit only works within selected object. I like to rubber-band select
nodes from a number of objects and move them to “stretch” an drawing in that
particular area. Doing one by one is close to impossible and stretching the
whole object is not what I want either.